Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Public Accounts Committee

Special Report No. 94 of the Comptroller and Auditor General: National Asset Management Agency Sale of Project Eagle (Resumed)

10:00 am

Mr. John Collison:

Yes. I suppose we looked at the portfolio in a fair bit of detail at the time. As I said, it certainly struck us that the portfolio was very, very concentrated. I think the top five debtor connections represented between 60% and 70% of the overall value. We could potentially have launched a sale of those but we really would have found it extremely difficult to divest ourselves of the tail - or more granular end - of the portfolio. We were certainly of the view that the portfolio needed more impairment and that is consistently referenced right throughout our papers from October into January. We felt that this portfolio, or a large part of it, was certainly falling in value. I suppose it did not present as many opportunities as we would have liked. Working these assets out was going to be extremely difficult as well. I mentioned in my opening statement that if we did not sell Project Eagle, further enforcement would have been inevitable. That would be certainly my opinion on where we were with some of these debtors. They were very, very difficult to manage. We have very limited progress vis-à-visour debtors in the Republic.

With regard to asset sales, there was huge experience of missed milestones. We found it difficult to get visibility on some of the rental income. We found it difficult to get control of some of the rental income. Any time assets were put on the market, there were reasons to delay the process. It was very difficult to manage a lot of these debtor connections.

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